Tag: Ken Redmond

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Narrative

Making Do

Getting the go-ahead to fabricate low-temperature bearings had proven easier than Ken had expected. After all, they were dealing with parts for landers, which meant all kinds of very technical FAA regulations. Quite honestly, he’d expected Reggie to balk hard, to say no way in hell was this project going through on his watch.

On the other hand, this was an emergency situation, and a lot of slack got cut when your back was against the wall. Although Ken had spent the Energy Wars stateside, overseeing maintenance operations at one or another airbase, he’d heard plenty of war stories from the guys who’d been in the sandbox. Guys who’d been downed in a hot landing zone and had to make emergency repairs with whatever they could cobble together — stuff that would put a plane out of spec if it had been done in a peacetime situation, let alone a civilian aircraft. But when the enemy was breathing down your neck, you did what it took to let you get back to friendly territory, and sorted things out afterward.

Up here the enemy wasn’t religious fanatics who believed God wanted them to kill infidels. The natural world could be far more relentless than any terrorist, and just as deadly. In normal times, specifications and procedures kept you safe. But in an emergency, blindly following procedures could become a case of following a rule straight over a cliff.

And Reggie was a combat veteran. He’d spent most of the Energy Wars flying off carriers, and he’d had all the training those guys got to prepare them for the possibility of being downed in enemy territory, of being captured and held prisoner, all things that required more than a cookbook approach.

Now that they were beginning the production process — he couldn’t really call it a line, because it was going to be a small-batch process — he needed to convince Bill Hearne down at Flight Ops to actually test their product. He’d been an astronaut for decades, plenty of time to grow set in his ways — but he was also the last commander of the Falcon, and keeping his crew alive until Nekrasov and the Baikal could rescue them had taken some incredible feats of improvisation.

As it turned out, Bill was already waiting for Ken when he arrived at Flight Ops. Yes, it had been a good idea to send all the documentation down for review ahead of time.

“You’ve got some pretty ambitious plans here, Ken. I know your guys do good work, but this isn’t exactly the thing you can spitball together with chewing gum and baling wire like we used to do the chiller in the milkhouse back on the farm. This stuff’s running a hell of a lot colder than any Freon setup.”

“True, but if we wait until we completely run out of spares, what do we do when half the lander fleet is grounded? We may not be making as many orbital runs to Luna Station these days, but we’re still making all those suborbital hops to the outlying settlements that don’t have their own greenhouse farms or manufacturing, or a whole laundry list of things that work a lot better at scale.”

When he got Bill’s agreement on that front, he pressed home his real ask. “So what we’ll do is set all the existing spare parts aside for the actual landers, and start testing the ones we’re manufacturing here on ground-based applications. Start with the stationary cryo-pumps. I know there are plenty around here. Then we start using them on the crawlers, since they have cryo-pumps in their fuel cell systems. If they hold up to those uses, we can start judiciously using them in the landers.”

“In which case I’ll have to find volunteers to test-fly every one that we put a non-standard low-temperature bearing in, before they can be re-certified for routine operations. Just like Slayton Field had to re-certify every goddamn lander after the cyber-attack.”

“Of course.” Ken had learned those requirements back when he was a second lieutenant overseeing maintenance back in his Air Force days. “Now we have a procedure to go by, and we can evaluate it as we proceed.”

Right now, even a small victory was a welcome one. And he had a bad feeling that the shortage of spare low-temperature bearings was just the first of many chokepoints that was coming down the pike.

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Remembered Days

The Science Department conference room felt ridiculously enormous for just two men to meet. However, Ken Redmond appreciated the choice of venue. Not just the fact that it was more spacious than either his or Reggie’s office, but the fact that it was neutral ground, so it didn’t have the emotional weight of meeting in either of their offices.

On the whole Reggie was a pretty laid-back commanding officer, especially for a Shep. Ken had heard plenty of stories about Alan Shepard’s management style as Chief Astronaut, even if those days had been long before his time. But when you went up to Reggie’s office, even to deliver a report rather than to answer for some fault in your department, there was always a sense of unease, of being on the spot. And when he came to your office, you always felt like your entire department was under the microscope.

Of course the real reason for them meeting here was the sophisticated 3-D A/V equipment Science had here. Equipment he needed for making his presentation on the innovative technique that might be able to produce replacement low-temperature bearings for the various cryo-pumps the settlement used.

Sure, he could’ve used the computer and monitor on his desk, maybe even offered the boss a pair of spex, but it wasn’t quite the same as having the images floating there on the tabletop, so real you’d think you could reach out and touch them. And right now, when he was asking for the boss to OK a huge departure from normal procedure, one that would involve changes in normal flight-certification procedures, he wanted the most persuasive presentation he could manage. Because he was really, really asking the boss to stick his neck out here.

Reggie arrived just as Ken was finishing his final checks on the equipment, making sure everything would show without any glitches. “So what are we looking at that’s so important we need the holoprojector system up here?”

Ken explained about the bearings. “Ever since NASA terminated the contract with McHenery and switched to Salwell, they’ve been wearing out about three times as fast, and we’ve been having no end of trouble maintaining our supply of spares.”

“Salwell? Wasn’t that part of North American Aviation?”

“North American bought them out during the build-up to the Space Shuttle program, and it got spun off again after Boeing bought out North American.”

That got a nod from Reggie. “I remember that now. Probably because they had more of the corporate culture problems than the guys from Seattle wanted to beat out of a new acquisition.”

“North American always had corporate culture problems. It goes way back to Apollo, and I’ve got it on good authority that you could scare them straight for a while after a bad accident, but it never solved the root problem, so it was always a matter of time before they’d start getting lax about the technical stuff. I honestly don’t understand why NASA kept going back to them when you couldn’t rely on them.”

“Because NASA’s a government agency, and therefore beholden to the bidding process.” Reggie leaned back in his chair, looking so much like Alan Shepard that Ken could completely understand how Wally Schirra could take a double-take at encountering him. “So North American underbids everyone else, gets the contract, and then ends up going over budget because half their work’s substandard. But the bean-counters only look at the up-front numbers, so NASA’s pretty much stuck. Get a bad enough accident and you might be able to shake things loose for a while, but then bureaucratic systems reassert themselves.”

A memory came back to Ken. He’d gone over to his ur-brother’s place to return some equipment, and was surprised to discover that Admiral Chaffee had come down to visit with his old boss. It would’ve had to have been some time in ’97, because President Dole had already nominated him as NASA Administrator but it hadn’t been officially confirmed by the Senate. However, he was already digging into the moonbase disaster, because he had brought a briefcase of papers with him and had them scattered about the table for Gus to examine.

Ken still remembered the admiral holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and whacking at them with the other as he made a point about unreliable contractors and nothing ever changing. It had been an awkward moment for a much younger man to have stumbled into such serious business — and Ken had not wanted to say or do anything that would have implied a criticism of Betty Grissom for sending him back here. So he’d stood there, making himself one with the wall as best he could, and got a ringside seat on the sorry story of the failures behind the disaster.

But was it really his story to tell here and now? He still remembered cringing at that horrible tell-all biography that had come out right after the admiral’s death.

No, telling that story added nothing to what he had to say. And they really needed to concentrate on his presentation now. Best to slide the conversation that way so he could lower the light level in here and get those holoprojectors running.

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The First Cracks

It was a good thing Ken Redmond was used to being able to concentrate in noisy environments, because his office here in Engineering was anything but quiet. Not surprising when it had been constructed of the lunar equivalent of wallboard, fastened to a frame of lunar aluminum.

In a city where pressurized volume was at a premium, noisy machinery was never far away. Not so close as to require hearing protection, but still an ever-changing background din, just enough to draw one’s attention, to disrupt one’s focus on the task at hand. And given that he was looking over specs for a new installation, he needed his attention on his work.

Which was why he did not appreciate having his phone pick that moment to start ringing. Glowering, he grabbed it and growled, “Engineering, Redmond speaking.”

“This is Carter Branning down at Flight Ops. One of my crews just pulled a cryo-pump on one of the landers, and we’ve got a major problem. You know those low-temperature bearings we’ve been having no end of trouble with? They’re going out on this one too, and NASA’s had our spares backordered since before this mess started.”

A chill brought gooseflesh to Ken’s skin, even in the ever-present heat of Engineering. Without working cryo-pumps to move cryogenic fuels and oxidizers, spacecraft couldn’t fly. Although it would be possible to pull a working cryo-pump from a lander with a different problem, you couldn’t do it indefinitely. Eventually you had to either have a new supply of spares or you were sidelining so many that your fleet was understrength.

“Have you asked over at Slayton Field or Coopersvile whether they have any extras?”

“First thing I tried, and they’re under minimum to be able to lend us any. Even called Edo Settlement, since JAXA uses a lot of our equipment, but that’s one item they didn’t adopt. Everyone knows those things are garbage, and it was a political decision to switch away from McHenery Aerospace to the bozos who made them.”

Ken had plenty of recriminations of his own, but they didn’t get equipment repaired. “I’ll talk to Zack, see if he knows of anything compatible we’re using for other applications. Otherwise, we’re going to have to fabricate something, and those low-temperature applications are the devil.”

“Tell me about it. We’ve got a complete machine shop down here at Flight Ops, but even it doesn’t have the equipment to work on low-temperature fittings for cryo-pumps. Things start acting weird when you’re talking single digits in Kelvin.”

Ken had too much to do right now to waste time grousing about the situation. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know what we’re going to be looking at.”

Now to get Zack on the horn and get that kid to work on the problem. Then Ken could finally get back to what he was supposed to be doing, that actually needed his authority.

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Keeping Mum

All the previous day, Brenda Redmond had waited, wondering when she’d hear anything further from Autumn Belfontaine, but not wanting to ask. As alarmed as Autumn had been about Drew’s news, it did not sound like a good idea to say or do anything that might draw attention to their private meeting.

Equally, she wasn’t sure if it was wise to try to contact Drew to find out if he’d learned anything further. The more she thought about it, the more she could see that satisfying her curiosity wasn’t worth the risk. Especially given that he was stationed over at Slayton Field, and Grissom City was under the command of a man who regarded Captain Waite as being out of line.

The worst problem was how the kids picked up on her tension. She was trying to act as if everything was completely ordinary — as if there’d been such a thing as an ordinary day since this whole mess started — but they’d kept peppering her with a bazillion questions. Not quite what’s going on? but stuff like when they’d get to see Daddy again and why couldn’t they pull up their favorite TV program any more, all stuff they’d asked dozens of times.The answers weren’t changing, and she knew that they weren’t getting any more satisfying for children so young that next week was an eternity away.

Just getting them to bed and quiet had been hard enough that she was exhausted by the time she got to sleep. At least they slept through the night, so she didn’t have to go through endless repetitions of the process.

But all the same, she was glad now that she had dropped them off at their classes and gotten to work. Being a DJ was a high-energy job, but at least it was an adult job, which involved talking to grown-ups at a grown-up level.

And in her case, there was also the chance that Autumn might just have some new information for her. Except she couldn’t be too obvious about hoping. Even when Autumn came in to deliver the morning news reports, Brenda had to act as if everything were normal and unremarkable.

Midway through her air shift, Brenda put up a long set so she could get out for a little stretch. As she was walking down the corridor past the station offices, she heard the programming director talking on the phone. “…can bring it by any time. As long as we’re broadcasting on the location rig, we should be able to install and test without any disruption.”

Dad’s got the new main board finished. It’ll be so good to have it back again.

Except she also knew she couldn’t let on that she had overheard. Heck, she’d probably better show some surprise if her father came over here to supervise the installation.

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Know When to Hold ’em

Although Spruance Del Curtin was a reasonably decent assistant in the process of troubleshooting the main mixing board, his skills really weren’t to the point that it made sense to have someone else cover his air shift so he could continue helping. Ken had told him to go ahead and sign on, since the Timeline Brothers both had other obligations in the afternoon.

However, the process of tracing and testing the circuits was not going nearly as well as she would’ve liked, even with a couple of the younger kids. They were good about handing up tools upon request, but they really didn’t know electronics well enough to interpret what they were seeing and offer any insight.

Ursula Doorne wasn’t exactly sure where it became clear the problem was much larger than any single component. By mid-afternoon, it was becoming increasingly clear that continuing to trace the circuitry in hope of isolating the problem was a hopeless task.

Ken had just come back to see how things were going, and it was clear he’d been dealing with some other issues somewhere else in the settlement. No, he was not going to like the news.

But there was no point wasting further time just to spare his temper. Especially since she had projects on her desk back in the Astronomy Department, and not just the more abstract and abstruse ones involved with using dishes on both the Moon and Mars to create an array on a baseline that dwarfed all previous efforts.

“Whatever’s wrong with this, it’s not just one component. We’re going to have to completely tear it down and rebuild it.”

Ken muttered a word he didn’t ordinarily use in the presence of civilians. “That’s going to be a lot of work.” He met her eyes directly. “But if you’re right, it’ll save us a lot more work in the long run. However, we are going to have to make sure that the remote rig gets a complete maintenance cycle as soon as we get a working main mixing board. That thing was never designed for the level of use we’re putting it through, and we cannot afford to have it give out on us.”

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A Change of Plans

Spruance Del Curtin was on his way to the Astronomy Department when his phone chimed incoming text. What would it be now?

It was Dr. Doorne: Meet me at the station.

So whatever was going on with broadcast quality, she was involved in it. On second thought, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised, given that signals processing was her engineering specialty.

He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or disappointed that he wasn’t going to be going through data today. Quite honestly, it was getting tedious, even if he did like being someone’s special student, trusted with actual research material.

All the same, he knew he was going to get some questions when he turned around and headed back the other way. There were enough people up here in Miskatonic Sector who knew he was doing data work for Dr. Doorne every morning, and would want to know why he was heading the “wrong” way.

Except that, given most people around here did listen to Shepardsport Pirate Radio at least some, even if only on their alarm clock, they’d be aware that something was wrong down there.

As it turned out, he actually managed to arrive at the station offices before his mentor. Then again, she might not know some of the back ways through the service passages that he did. He’d worked for Engineering long enough that he’d learned quite a few shortcuts that weren’t strictly approved, but could shave off a few minutes when seconds counted.

As he’d expected, the place was already crowded. Not just the usual station staff, but half a dozen people from Engineering, including the big boss himself. And no, Ken Redmond did not look pleased today.

Make that double when he looked at Sprue. “So what brings you down’ here today?”

“Sir, Dr. Doorne just texted me to come down here.”

Ken narrowed his eyes. “How convenient–“

At that moment a familiar voice joined the fray. “Major Redmond, if you will listen to me for a moment.”

Dr. Doorne spoke with sufficient authority that Ken Redmond turned to face her. She continued in the same firm tone. “I requested Mr. Del Curtin to meet me here because I believe the skills he’s learned with me will be of use in this problem. Now, if we can take a look at the equipment we are dealing with.”

With that settled, Ken Redmond led them back to the main mixing board. Dr. Doorne set out a bag of equipment and they set to work.

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The Many-Talented

Ursula Doorne went over the latest solar activity data, seeking the patterns that warned of imminent instability in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Normally she’d be reasonably confident of her ability to scan through the data and pick out those patterns, although it wasn’t her specialty. After having been surprised twice now, she was no longer feeling so confident.

In fact, she was feeling very much like a rank beginner all over again. A whole lot of stuff she had assumed about the way in which the Sun — and by extension main-sequence stars of that size in general — operated was now very much in question once again. Theories that had been considered pretty much standard when she was doing her undergraduate work were now having to be reconsidered.

When she’d been a student, she’d thought it would be so exciting to be a scientist during such a major paradigm shift. And quite honestly, it might well have been, if the science she was dealing with were something in distant galaxies, so far away as to effectively be abstract. But this was stuff that could mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people up here on the Moon, millions down on Earth. And not just faceless masses, but her own family, her colleagues, her neighbors. Her own husband was a pilot-astronaut, and while spacecraft shielding was a hell of a lot better than in the early days of Apollo and Zond, it still provided only sufficient protection for ordinary solar storms. For the big X-class ones, the astronauts depended in getting sufficient warning that they could get to shelter, whether in one of the larger orbital facilities or on the surface.

And if the Sun isn’t behaving the way our theories say it should, our forecasts are going to be just as unreliable.

Maybe that was why she felt as much at sea as right after the Expulsions began, when she got a message from the training department that she was being assigned an intro to astronomy class. And not even an undergraduate-level one. This one was going to be aimed at middle-school kids, at a time when she wasn’t even sure how to talk to kids that age, let alone describe the discipline she’d spent a lifetime mastering in words they could understand.

And you went back to first principles. Started with the story of early humans looking up at the sky and seeing the lights in them, and realizing over time that there were patterns to their movements. There’s got to be a new set of patterns in the data, but we just don’t know how to see them yet. Best case, it’ll turn out that our current theories are a special case, and we just haven’t seen the conditions that are leading to what we’re observing. Let’s hope we don’t have to throw out everything we thought we knew and start all over.

And then her phone rang. She’d halfway expected it to be one of her colleagues with a new insight on the data. Instead it was Ken Redmond from Engineering.

“Dr. Doorne, we’ve got a problem down here at the station. You’re our best signals processing person who isn’t tied up in one kind of quarantine or another. Can you get down here and take a look at it?”

In this context “the station” would refer to Shepardsport Pirate Radio. For the most part she’d viewed it as something on the order of the underground newspaper that had been circulated at her high school, albeit a little more approved by the authorities than those photocopied sheets that passed from hand to hand every morning. But given that the head of Engineering was specifically requesting her skills, there wasn’t much way of saying no.

“I’ll be on my way.”

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Bigger Than We’d Expected

Ken Redmond had called a halt on their efforts to repair the main mixing board shortly before midnight, right before Spencer Dawes would wind down the Disco Ball and sign off. It was becoming increasingly obvious that everyone was tired enough to affect judgement, and given that the midnight-to-six segment was run by a software robot that selected songs and could make basic announcements, it made far more sense to send everyone home for a good night’s rest and start over in the morning.

Now that morning was here, Ken was no longer feeling quite so sanguine about the ease of repairs on this issue. It didn’t help that he couldn’t go straight to the studios of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, since there were a number of other issues around the settlement that he needed to follow up on first. Not that Juss Forsythe was a bad tech, but he was still young enough that he simply didn’t have the years and decades of experience that often allowed an old hand like Ken to make intuitive leaps on fragmentary information.

By the time Ken finally had his docket cleared enough that he could even consider going over to look into matters personally, Brenda was winding up Breakfast With The Beatles and getting ready to hand things over to Lou Corlin. They were both experienced enough with dong remote broadcasts to be able to use that system to its best advantage, but there was no mistaking it for the full studio system.

On the other hand, the network traffic reports he’d gotten from IT were showing that the lowered transmission quality hadn’t led to a significant drop in listenership. In fact, it looked like connections from outside the lunar Internet had actually picked up, which made him wonder. Could it be a case of people trying to connect multiple devices in hope that one would have better reception?

From some things that Autumn Belfontaine had said, it was sounding like a lot of dirtside radio stations were resorting to various makeshifts just to be able to broadcast at all. Some of them were sharing transmitters, running simulcasts, even going all Internet when their ability to broadcast over the airwaves was lost. So it was possible that a lot of people were getting used to making do with whatever they could find.

It must be getting really bad down there. It made him realize just how little connection he had with family on Earth. Both his parents were deceased, and Jenn was estranged from her mother. He had a couple of siblings, but they’d drifted apart, to the point they rarely corresponded other than at the holidays. No hard rupture like Jenn’s break with her mother, just an ever-growing lack of common points of reference that made it hard to communicate.

As Ken walked into the offices of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, he encountered Juss walking out. The younger man had a worried expression. “I was just looking for you. We’ve got a major problem. I’m thinking we’re going to have to tear that mixing board down and rewire about half of it.”

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Get ‘er Done

Having dropped off the data with Autumn Belfontaine, Steffi continued through the corridors of Engineering with Ken Redmond. “I’m not that much of a statistician, but it was interesting to see the patterns in the distribution of network speeds and disruptions. I’d expected a lot of Africa and Asia to have trouble keeping their networks up. Until the recent mini-sat constellations, a lot of those countries didn’t even have Internet outside their major cities. But I’d expected better of Europe.”

Ken gave her a wry smile. “You must not have done much traveling back when you were still on Earth.”

“I was pretty busy, but I did go abroad to some conferences–“

“In major cities, with people who had a Western education, often at universities in the US. Not out in the hinterland, working with people who’re living the way their ancestors did since time immemorial. Now there’s an eye-opener for you.” Ken paused as if considering what he was about to say. “Back in the Energy Wars, I did a tour of duty in the Middle East. We were at a base right near one of the bigger cities, and one of the things I really remember is how, whenever anything went wrong, everyone would wait for someone in charge to come and give orders. No one wanted to be the guy who stuck his neck out and tried something that might work.”

Steffi’s expression must’ve been more transparent than she realized, because Ken responded, “It’s a lot more common than you think, and not just in Third World countries. Heck, half of Europe is damn close to it, just not as crude about it. But you go to Germany or Sweden or any of those countries, visit an office and need something copied, only the copier’s jammed. In any American office, someone would be opening the thing up and digging the paper out to get it running again. Over there, only the person with the proper authorization can even touch the inner workings of the copier.”

“Come to think of it, that would go a long way to explain why almost all the connections that seemed pretty jury-rigged looked to be in the US. Some Canadian ones, a couple from Australia and New Zealand, but that was about it.”

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Of Resilience and Antifragility

When Autumn had talked with Lou Corlin, she’d expected that it would take a while to get the data, if it was even possible. IT had a lot of work on its plate already, and this job was more a matter of curiosity. So it was better to spend the time developing some contacts in the Astronomy department so she could follow up on Sprue’s lead without having to out him as the leak.

Being a proctor down at the testing center did give her one advantage — she already had established contacts with plenty of research scientists up here. Even if they weren’t in the Astronomy department, most of them had working relationships with people there. So much of science these days was heavily interdisciplinary, and Shepardsport was still small enough that it was more like a small town.

She’d just finished talking with a physicist who’d immediately started geeking out on her about his specialty, magnetohydrodynamics. From what she could extract, it had definite applicability to the Sun, and to stars in general, which had gotten his name on a number of astronomy papers as a contributing author. However, most of his knowledge was sufficiently technical that she’d been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of it. Sure, she had the general astronomy classes everyone up here had to take, but it sure didn’t give her the background to really grasp it.

So she’d decided to take a break and stretch her legs. As news director, she was salaried and didn’t have to worry about being on the clock like the hourly employees.

As she stepped out of the station’s front door, she saw Ken Redmond and Steffi Roderick walking down the main Engineering corridor, talking in low voices. Assuming it was something private, she turned the other direction, only to have Steffi call out her name.

“I was going to drop this off with Maia, but since you’re here, I thought I’d give it to you in person.”

It was a USB stick. “Um, thanks. I gather this is some data I’ve asked for.”

“The project you’d approached Lou about, related to Internet connectivity and how it has degraded since the beginning of the pandemic. I had some of our programmers write up a script to systematically ping IP addresses all across the system. I did some preliminary statistical analysis on it, and yes, there are definitely patterns in it. From the looks of it, we’ve lost whole regions. Some of them were to be expected, in countries where the tech base was always fragile, but we’ve had some surprising ones, especially in Western Europe. However, the US is holding together better than would be expected, although from some of the response times, we may be looking at a lot of jerry-rigged connections.”

Ken was nodding in agreement. “Not surprising. The Internet was originally a Defense Department project to create a decentralized communications system that would hold together even if numerous major cities were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Just like the old Timex watches, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”